Court Case

The German bishop suspended by the Vatican last month for spending lavishly on foreign travel and furnishings for his $42-million residence renovation has paid a $27,000 fine to settle a court case brought against him for lying under oath. Bishop Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst of Limburg was accused by German prosecutors of bringing a false claim against Der Spiegel after the weekly news magazine reported that he had flown first class on trips to minister to slum-dwellers in India last year.

The gig: Los Angeles graphologist Andrea McNichol is no stranger to high-profile court cases. As an examiner of questioned documents, she has worked on the murder trials of O.J. Simpson and Ted Bundy and the legal challenge of Howard Hughes' will. Clients of McNichol, the author of "Handwriting Analysis: Putting It to Work for You," include the FBI, other law enforcement agencies and Fortune 500 companies. Baseline: McNichol has used her knowledge of handwriting to assess death threats, debunk hoaxes and expose fraud.

The heroic effort of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker in 2011 to rein in public employee unions has started to produce results. One of Walker's reforms required a majority of members to vote each year to certify the union as its representative. Since that simple change took effect, 13% of Wisconsin's teacher and public employee unions have been decertified because they can't get enough employees to vote to keep the union and pay union dues. When given a choice, it seems public employees themselves don't necessarily support union policies.

Re “Baby Messiah case brings ACLU, conservatives closer,” Aug. 19 Frankly, is the name Messiah any different than naming a child Moses, Mohammed or Jesus? All of those are fairly common in today's religious melting pot. It is our duty as members of a sane society to have the conversation about the correctness of such names. Those decisions can never be made by judicial fiat determined in a court of law. As I come from a family some of whose members were Holocaust survivors, no doubt I would have serious issues if I went, for example, to a school function and were introduced to the Campbell family mentioned in the article by their given names.

In the nearly two decades since California voters banned the use of affirmative action in college admissions, the two most competitive University of California schools - UCLA and Berkeley - saw enrollments of black and Latino students plunge and have struggled to recover. The UC system has adopted a number of recruiting and admissions measures to legally work around the 1996 ban, Proposition 209. But the enrollment of these two groups has not completely rebounded. At UCLA, for example, African American freshmen dropped from 7.1% of the class in 1995 to 3.6% last fall.

When federal officials recently confirmed the existence of a massive National Security Agency program that has been collecting Americans' phone data for years, they argued it was needed to fight terrorism. But that acknowledgment has opened potentially seismic rifts in the nation's legal system, allowing defendants to argue that the government is holding a massive trove of evidence that is necessary to their cases - the same kind of evidence that, when it's collected by police, is commonly turned over to defendants.

SAN DIEGO -- An Oceanside couple were sentenced Monday to lengthy prison terms for brutally keeping an under-age relative as a sex slave, housekeeper, baby sitter and prostitute. Inez Martinez Garcia, 44, was sentenced to 20 years in prison, and her husband, Marcial Garcia Hernandez, 45, to 23 years to life. Each had pleaded guilty to multiple counts of abuse. The two were accused of forcing the girl to clean and cook, take care of the couple's three children and have sex with Hernandez and with other men for money.

The heirs of the Budapest-based Jewish banker Baron Mor Lipot Herzog have cleared a major legal hurdle in their decades-long quest to force Hungary to return dozens of artworks from Herzog's collection that were looted during World War II. In 2010, Herzog's great-grandson David de Csepel of Altadena led his family in suing Hungary and three of its museums for the return of more than 40 artworks valued at $100 million, including masterpieces by...

A federal judge on Friday rejected Gov. Jerry Brown's claim that California has improved inmate care enough to end 17 years of court oversight of its less-crowded prisons. Brown has vowed to challenge any such rejection, if need be, before the same U.S. Supreme Court that less than two years ago deemed California prison conditions shocking. U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton's decision is a blow to Brown's larger ambition to remove court caps on prison crowding and end court control over a $1.6-billion prison medical program.

WASHINGTON - Certain law partners no longer call Theodore B. Olson for lunch. Old friends no longer come to dinner at his sprawling house in the woods near the Potomac. One of his best friends died in December, somewhat estranged. All since Olson - the conservative legal hero, crusader against Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton, defender of George W. Bush - signed on to fight for same-sex marriage in California, a battle that he will take to the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday when he challenges Proposition 8, the state measure that banned gay marriage.